Friday 18 May 2007

More crap for home-owners

Expect to see this here soon. Just introduced in Britain is more green-plated bureaucratic crap and more expense for home-owners: What are called Home Information Packs. These are packs which people selling their home must make available to buyers. They become compulsory on June 1 and could cost sellers between £600 and £1,000. The packs, says Samizdata,
will have to include details about the energy efficiency of a house and they are driven, in part, by the current focus on environmental issues. It is further evidence of how the green movement is replacing old-style socialism as a prime driver of regulation and tax.
Blogger Tim Worstall makes the obvious point, that if these bloody packs and the whole bureaucracy that goes with them are such a great idea for buyers and sellers of properties, then surely the market would react accordingly.
Those who find (whether buyers or sellers) that they are worth £1,000 will get them or seek properties that have them, those that don't will not. If buyers value them more than sellers then the market will similarly pretty quickly sort that out.

There is, as ever, one slight problem with such elegant simplicity. The energy efficiency part of it cannot be made voluntary as it is part of the imposition of EU law upon us.

Can we leave yet?

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